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Todd Irvine thought there’d been an accident when he came upon traffic snarled by a person lying in the middle of the road.

Thinking smartly, the 41-year-old arborist parked his vehicle diagonally across Gerrard St., to prevent cars from entering that section, going either east or west.

“I didn’t want him to be hit again,” Irvine told court on Wednesday.

“I saw he was bleeding, lying on his back almost spread-eagled, arms above his head. His eyes were closed but he was responding.”

While Irvine’s wife called 9-1-1 — so panicked that she first attempted to dial on her calculator — he spoke with the prone individual.

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“His shirt was just drenched with blood. And there was green tape on both of his wrists. I couldn’t make sense of why he was bleeding.”

Irvine tried reassuring the young man. “I told him he was going to be all right.”

The victim looked scared, Irvine testified. “He was muttering. He seemed as though he knew he was not doing well.”

Weakly, briefly, the man explained what had happened. “He said he’d been stabbed. He said he’d come from an apartment in Regent Park.”

The man on the street was Christopher Husbands. The date was Feb. 28, 2012. And the stabbing, as the jury heard earlier in the trial, occurred during an ambush when Husbands appeared at the home of a girlfriend to celebrate his birthday, champagne bottle in hand.

Unbeknown to Husbands, that woman had recently moved. Instead, he was confronted by a group of assailants who set upon him viciously. Husbands suffered 35 stab wounds to the upper torso.

That incident, as both the prosecution and defence agree, was the impetus behind a chaotic shooting at the Eaton Centre just over three months later that left two men dead and five innocent bystanders wounded, including a 13-year-old boy who took a bullet in the head.

Through his lawyer, Husbands, 25, has conceded that he was the shooter that day; that he was responsible for the slaying of Nixon Nirmalendran, 22, and Ahmed Hassan, 25. But he’s pleaded not guilty to two counts of first-degree murder and five counts of aggravated assault.

“This trial really is about what was on Christopher Husbands’ mind,” lawyer Dirk Derstine told the jury in brief opening remarks as the defence began making its case yesterday. “The real issue was: What was he thinking?

“We will be calling him shortly.”

Derstine started by summoning Irvine to the stand, a witness involved only peripherally with the case, but someone who could bring focus to the pivotal event which, the defence says, triggered the later shooting. The defence is arguing that Husbands reached for his gun and started blasting when he spotted a group of five men in the mall food court on June 2. Among them was one of the men — allegedly Nirmalendran — who’d jumped him in February, individuals Husbands afterwards told police he didn’t know and couldn’t identify, other than that they had Somali accents.

The defence maintains the shooting was reactionary, not planned, therefore not rising to the threshold of first-degree murder. This despite the fact the jury has seen multiple surveillance videotapes of Husbands — who’d been standing nearby while his girlfriend placed an order at Sushi Q — pulling out the weapon, firing repeatedly, then standing directly over the critically injured Nirmalendran, pulling the trigger again and again. Nirmalendran died of his injuries nine days later in hospital. Hassan was killed on the spot as he turned to flee, while terrified mall patrons scattered in every direction.

Husbands turned himself in to police at 2:30 a.m., June 4.

The prosecution asserts that Husbands knew the identity of his assailants all along and that the motive for the shootings was revenge for the beating, which may have been provoked by a drug deal gone bad or, alternatively, displeasure over Husbands’ involvement with the woman he’d gone to see that night in February.

In earlier testimony, the Crown called that woman, Anne-Marie Campbell. The 41-year-old testified she’s known Husbands since the accused was a teenager and a friend of her son, Deandry.

Campbell denies having a romantic relationship with Husbands. But she testified the defendants revealed to her that he’d shot two men at the Eaton Centre.

“Why did you do it?” she asked Husbands at the Toronto (Don) Jail after his arrest. “Because they stabbed me,” she quoted him as saying.

Under cross-examination last week, Campbell told Derstine she had “no reason to believe” her son was among the young men who had attacked Husbands outside her old Gerrard St. apartment.

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